Company: Fortinet
Company background: Fortinet have been using Khoros for Communities since 2021, after combining multiple support channels into one source of customer knowledge.
Contact: Kate McMillan
Title: Senior Service Technology Manager
Related URLs: community.fortinet.com
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how?
Our main objectives were to amalgamate support knowledge into one place, make it easier for our customers to self-serve support, and provide a place for collaboration and discussion for our growing customer base.
By combining support knowledge from multiple silos into a single location, customers know where to find what they're looking for and get the answers they need.
We've evolved to be an extremely Knowledge Base heavy platform - although the Forum remains strong too. With a large number of Fortinet support engineers globally, we're able to harvest a wealth of complex technical knowledge and our aim is to get that knowledge customer-ready as soon as possible so that the maximum number of customers can benefit from it. The Knowledge Base has become a living, breathing part of what we do daily, and our team of Technical Writers are both detail-focused and enthusiastic about getting as much knowledge 'out there' as possible.
2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved?
We have had a huge amount of support and buy-in from across the business. Working with Khoros through the Community workshops really helped to clarify where we wanted to get to, and we used this story to gain support for our journey from across Fortinet.
We continue to work with all of our global support locations to promote the value of Community, of reusing knowledge, and of encouraging customers to search for answers. If our customers can quickly find solutions to their issues because someone has asked a question before, everyone wins.
3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible.
We have created a single destination for support knowledge for our customers - . visitor numbers are beyond our expectations (30 million page views and counting), and we have seen significant growth in the 18 months since the Community launched. Our Knowledge Base has grown by over 40% and we're seeing stabilising case numbers alongside rapid growth across the business, demonstrating the role that these articles play in helping our customers to help themselves.
We've also seen a 45% increase in member logins year on year, which is a great indicator of the work we're doing to encourage participation, peer to peer conversations and active sharing within Community.
By gamifying the knowledge creation process, we've been able to engage engineers and encourage the capture of reusable knowledge within community. Our 'First Birthday' badge among various initiatives has helped to keep fresh knowledge on the platform and promote the knowledge-centered culture we're striving for.
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